A Flash of Fang, page 1
A Flash of Fang
by R.E. Butler
Copyright 2011 R.E. Butler
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
**Cover Design by Kameko Gay. Photographer: Holly Amlin (Image: "All fires have to burn alive")
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This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is coincidental.
Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic sexual content and is intended for those over the age of 18 only.
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Because I couldn’t leave Elizabeth, Ash, and Axe’s story alone...this book is for anyone that has ever sacrificed their own happiness for love. To B.B. because you love me. To K.G. because you are awesome. And to B.L., just because.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
From the Author and Other Works
Chapter One
Drumming my fingers against my purse, I sat in the doctor’s office waiting room with one of my two were-bear husbands sitting next to me. The picture of perfect calm, Ash reclined in the straight backed chair and fiddled with his cell phone.
“Why are you so nervous, aleni?” Ash asked, calling me their pet name for me, which meant little bear.
“I don’t know.” I sighed and shifted in the uncomfortable seat to look at my husband. We’d been mated by were-bear standards since before the full moon in March, prior to the spring solstice. In June, we married by human standards, and he and his identical twin Axe became not only my guards for the wiccan ceremonies that required me to officiate as South Corner, but also my all around guards so that I never really went anywhere alone anymore, ever.
I wasn’t complaining. Not exactly. But I’d never been to an OB appointment with a man before, and it was just a little weird. But that wasn’t really what was bothering me. The last few weeks I’d started to have bad dreams. Not nightmares, exactly, but they were bad nonetheless. I always woke up unable to remember what was in the dreams except that it wasn’t good. Try as I might, I could never remember anything about them. And with the bad dreams came unhappy days, as worry plagued my thoughts. Was I just having generic bad dreams for no reason at all, or was the universe trying to tell me something? I knew that Ash and Axe were picking up on my unhappiness even though I tried to shield my mood from them.
Picking up my harried thoughts, I said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen when my IUD is out, and with the fall mating season coming up quickly, I’m just kind of worried.”
He flipped his onyx hair over his shoulder and gave me the weight of his dark eyes. “If you don’t become pregnant with this heat, there’s always spring. And if not then, eventually, I know that you’ll carry our cubs.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that it wasn’t that I worried about becoming pregnant, necessarily, but that I had this weird tickling feeling in the back of my mind because of the dreams that something bad was coming. It made me feel like the last thing I should be thinking about was having a child.
Something wicked this way comes….
My thought process was interrupted when the nurse opened the door and said, “Elizabeth….Stalking Horse? Is that right?” She looked up in confusion.
“Yes.” I smiled and took Ash’s hand as he stood to his full six and a half feet of hot goodness. She looked up at him and said oh softly, making the connection of my last name to the man next to me. Ash was gorgeous. Long, straight, onyx hair fell to the middle of his back. His skin was the beautiful coppery color that heralded his Native American heritage. Set in his strikingly handsome face were brown eyes like melted dark chocolate surrounded with thick lashes, a straight nose, and a perfectly kissable mouth. Even though he wore a long sleeved Henley and jeans, it was easy to see that his body was sculpted, masculine and muscular. He looked so very young, like me, but there was nothing boyish about him except perhaps his sense of humor. That he was an identical twin just made him – both of them – that much hotter in my book.
My 5’5 curvy frame, ivory skin, dark brown hair, and jade green eyes were a stark contrast to the exotic man next to me. It never mattered to me, though, what others thought of us together. Because we just fit together perfectly. I was technically 18, although since my last birthday I was 18 plus 4, which was how supernatural beings talked about age. From the age of 18, I aged one full body year for every 12 years that passed. My husbands were 18 plus 10, identical twin were-bears that shared my unique long-life. I was so glad to be married to two men who aged as slowly as I did. If I had to watch my husbands die of old age while I stayed young, I wasn’t sure how I would deal with that.
We followed the nurse down the short hallway to the scale and I huffed at Ash and he grinned. Dropping a kiss to my ear, he made exaggerated motions of squeezing his eyes shut, clamping his hands over his ears and humming The Star Spangled Banner.
“He’s adorable,” the nurse gushed, swiftly clicking the weights around in front of me.
“He’s something alright,” I smiled at him even though he couldn’t see me.
“You’re right where you should be. Were you worried or something?” She asked, sliding the weights back to one end and casting a glance at Ash. I stepped off the scale and tugged on his arm.
“No, I just think there are some things that should be kept secret between husbands and wives and one of them is the exact weight of the wife.”
He rolled his beautiful eyes at me. “I’ve seen your drivers’ license, Elizabeth.”
“I rounded down. Maybe.” I grinned and he laughed, shaking his head.
The nurse sat down at the small desk in the narrow exam room and asked me the cursory questions about my health and history. When I turned 18, I had an IUD implanted to prevent pregnancy. I had known my own flighty brain would not do well with a daily pill, and extra hormones tended to make me wiggy anyway. And there was something unsatisfying about the thought that the quarterly shot could make me gain weight. So I got tested for the IUD to make sure it would fit, and it did, which meant at least in my head that I had the perfect sized uterus. Not that I could take a picture of it to frame or anything, but still. I liked having medical proof of my perfection, not just my glowing husbands’ comments. I found that most men, probably all of them, would say anything to get a woman naked. And once she got naked the first time, they said lots of wonderful, sexy things about her to encourage her to stay naked. Maybe it was just my horny husbands, though. I never really asked my friends about their sex lives and their men's abilities to encourage said nakedness.
The nurse handed me a short gown and walked out, shutting the door soundly. I had been sitting in Ash’s lap in the only free chair and when I stood, he eagerly tugged on the bottom of my shirt.
I slapped his hands away with a growl, “No, no. No touching. This isn’t for fun, it’s for…science.”
Toeing my shoes off, I began to work my shirt off and then my jeans. “Science, yeah? Sounds sexy.” He settled back in the chair and crossed his very long legs at the ankles and gave me a wicked smile. He could get me wet with a look. Damn it.
“You know,” I groused, tossing my clothes at him one by one until I was naked and climbed onto the exam table, “it’s not exactly okay for me to be all horny and wet before I get a pap.”
He snickered and tried to stop from laughing, but he couldn’t. He was just too good natured and funny to not enjoy the situation for what it was. I tugged the front opened short gown over my shoulders and laid the blanket across my bare hips. “You’re just lucky I was willing to trade my very handsome male doctor for a female.”
He stopped laughing abruptly. “Aleni,” he protested, “I don’t think you would want me to slaughter your doctor for touching your sweet treasure, would you?” He looked genuinely remorseful but I knew he was faking it.
“You’re impossible, Ash.”
“And very lucky.” He stood up and leaned over enough to kiss the tip of my nose and settled back in the chair with an amused look. The doctor came in a few minutes later as Ash and I were discussing our plans for the coming weekend. She was slender and tall, mid-40s with her long mouse brown hair pulled back in a sensible ponytail. After the cursory pleasantries, and trying to explain to a human that my husband wasn’t going to leave the room without me, she started the exam.
As she declared everything looked just fine, and then took out the IUD, I tried really hard not to make any pain noises, but it damn well was as uncomfortable coming out as it had been going in. Kind of like having someone push a stick up inside me and root around for kicks.
Ash was at my side the instant a little whimper caught in my throat, worry streaking his
Scribbling on the chart while Ash helped me sit up and I quietly groaned at the new ache in my belly, she said, “Okay, your cycle should start up within four to six weeks. You may have spotting at first, even for a few months, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant and shouldn’t look for signs of it, such as tender breasts and mild cramps. If you’re actively trying to get pregnant but are not within a year, then we’ll start some testing.” She smiled in a doctorly way and walked out of the room. As soon as it shut, Ash was rushing me into my clothes. I could almost taste his desperation to get me away from the humans and home so he could fawn over me.
The nurses behind the reception desk all sighed in envy when he walked out of the room carrying me in his arms. I would have thought it was funny if I hadn’t suddenly been so exhausted. I really hadn’t been sleeping well.
The drive home was quiet and he carried me into the house and laid me down on the couch and settled my head into his lap. I dozed off to the gentle stroking of his hand up and down my arm, his thumb sometimes tracing the length of my neck, and the quiet hum of whatever tune was in his head.
Groggily I was pulled slowly from my nap by a massaging hand on my foot. Since I could tell that Ash’s lap was still under my head, I knew it was Axe that had picked up my feet and put them in his lap. I heard the soft sound of a fist hitting flesh and Axe dropped my foot.
“Shit. What was that for?” Axe hissed.
“Don’t wake her up yet, she’s tired. I don’t think she’s sleeping well and that doctor hurt her to top off everything else.”
Axe growled gently, “Do I need to have a talk with this doctor?”
“No, no, she didn’t do it on purpose, but it’s a good thing I was there and not you. I could barely handle the look on her face when the doctor pulled that little birth control thingy from her. I could have broken her neck for it.”
Axe hummed in his throat, “You’re right, if I thought she was in pain I would have had the doctor by the throat in a heartbeat. You have better control than I do.”
“By a thin margin, brother.”
“Did she…mention how long it might take for her to be able to have a child?” Axe asked almost shyly.
“The doctor said four to six weeks before she would be back to normal. Then, we’ll see.”
“Do you think she’s ready?”
“She got it taken out, so I think so, but,” Ash sighed and his rhythmic touch faltered slightly. “something is bothering her but she won’t talk about it. Last night she was thrashing in her sleep and woke me up.”
“I’ve felt it, too. Our mate is unsettled. Maybe the full moon next week and the solstice right after it? Maybe we’re pushing her about the fall heat?”
I didn’t want them to get any further in their worried thoughts so I stirred as if I hadn’t been eavesdropping, and stretched between the two of them. I felt a kiss land on the space of my belly bared by my stretching and I dropped my hands to cup the back of Axe’s head.
“Hey baby,” I smiled at him. He kissed my stomach once more and leaned up on his impossibly long arms to kiss me on the mouth.
“Aleni, did we wake you?” He asked.
“No, I’m good. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” I looked up at Ash and pulled him down for a kiss as Axe moved to make room for him. “You’re very comforting and warm.”
“I aim to please my mate,” he said with a smile.
Lifting me gently so he could slide out from under me, he left the couch to make dinner for us, and Axe slid up the back of the couch and cuddled me into him. “There are some families that don’t have a mate that can cook, you know. We’re very lucky to have Ash.”
“I thought that twin bears were rare?”
“Twins are, yes, but not the multiple matings, especially in areas where there are so few females. Sometimes, two bears will feel the same mating pull to a single female. If she’s willing to share herself with them, then they enter into a family like ours.” He nuzzled under my neck, his warm breath skirting over me.
“And if she doesn’t want to share?”
“Well, the king could choose for her, or make her choose, or they could fight each other and the winner would get her. But it’s not in the males’ best interest for her to not want them both, because if they are called to her as a mate, then they may never have another opportunity to find a mate again.”
“That’s sad.” I rolled over completely until I was pressed against his chest and relaxed with a sigh. “But none of the males in our den are multiple partnered.”
“True. Like I said, it’s not a common thing, but it does happen. The den that is visiting us this month from Denver has a multiple partnered marriage; both of them are warriors for the den and share a mate.”
“And she’s a bear, I suppose?” I was always the only non-shifting person in any dens we ever visited or that visited us. Since our first full moon celebration in April, we’d spent most full moons entertaining or visiting other dens who wanted to see the collared bears and witch and revel in the power of a den in harmony and protection.
“Yes, love. Not everyone can be as lucky as us to share a feisty, mouth-watering, temptress of a witch like you.”
“Flattery won’t work. I’m too sleepy to have sex.”
He laughed and kissed my temple. “I love you, aleni. My sweet Wicca mate.”
Chapter Two
On Thursday, I stretched in the chair behind my desk in my office at the Cleveland Mother Earth Store, owned by the coven, and yawned. Ash looked up at me from his desk. “Do you want to go home, sweetheart?” He asked, concern etching his sweet face.
“Nah. I need to work on the blessing spell for the full moon next week and get ready for the solstice.”
“You aren’t sleeping well.”
I took a few seconds to think about how to answer him. I hedged with a half truth. “No, I guess not. There’s a lot going on this month. I can’t seem to shut my mind down long enough to rest.”
“Maybe we’re not wearing you out enough before bed?” He quirked his head to the side like he was really considering the situation. I laughed. “You guys do just fine, but I’m not turning down any extra hot sex.”
“I will totally keep that in mind.” He graced me with one of his devastating smiles and we both turned back to our work. While I perused a book of blessings and decided what to put together for the bears’ full moon ceremony, Ash busied himself programming a new mini laptop.
Axe joined us for lunch, bringing deli sandwiches on his way in from dropping off supplies at the house for the deck he was building on the back. He pulled me onto his lap on the comfortable couch in our shared office after we finished eating and nibbled light kisses up and down my neck.
While Ash smiled at us, Axe whispered in my ear, “Did I tell you how sexy my marks on your neck are?”
